Postage Guarantee

TL;DR – If we charge more than we should for shipping, we’ll refund the difference.

How We Calculate Shipping Fees

The Problem With Shipping Calculations

Shipping fees are hard. Really hard.

Not just because carriers charge different rates based on weight, dimensions, and destination – but because the moment you put multiple items into a single order, the question of how they all fit into a box becomes surprisingly complex. Get the box size wrong and you get the shipping fee wrong, sometimes significantly.

Most online stores take a shortcut here. They either charge a flat rate (which means you often overpay), use a simple weight-based calculation (which ignores dimensions entirely), or pad their product prices to hide the shipping cost altogether. We’ve told you how we feel about that kind of thing.

We chose to do it differently.

3D Bin Packing

We’ve built our own shipping fee calculator that uses a technique called 3D bin packing.

The idea is straightforward, even if the maths behind it isn’t: before we quote you a shipping fee at checkout, our system works out how your items would physically pack together inside a box. It considers the dimensions of each individual product, tries different combinations and orientations, and selects the smallest box that can realistically hold your entire order, prioritising Australia Post’s flat-rate packaging which is often very reasonable compared to cubic weight and distance. That box size then feeds into the carrier’s rate calculation – along with the total weight and your location – to give you the most accurate shipping fee we can.

This is a significant step up from the simple weight-only approach most stores use, and it means that in most cases the fee you see at checkout is a very close reflection of what it actually costs us to get your order to you.

But Nothing Is Perfect

We want to be upfront with you: 3D bin packing is a best approximation, not a guarantee.

Real-world packing doesn’t always match what the algorithm predicts. Odd-shaped items, fragile products that need extra padding, or combinations of items that technically fit but aren’t practical to pack together can all mean the actual box we use differs from the one the calculator selected. Carrier pricing can also shift. The result is that occasionally the fee charged at checkout will be different to the actual cost of getting your order out the door. If we’ve undercharged we’ll cop the hit – good for you. If we’ve overcharged we’ll refund the difference – good for you.

We think that’s worth being honest about.

Our Commitment

If we’ve overcharged you on shipping, we don’t want to keep money that isn’t ours.

Here’s our policy: if the shipping fee you were charged at checkout is more than $5 above our actual shipping cost, we will refund the difference to the payment method used for your order.

Our actual shipping cost is calculated as the price of the postage itself plus the cost of the packaging materials used to pack your order. We don’t pad that figure. We don’t round up. It’s just what it cost us.

The $5 tolerance exists because small discrepancies are an unavoidable reality of any automated system – no calculator is perfect, and we can’t reasonably process a refund every time there’s a few cents of difference. But if the gap is meaningful, we’ll make it right without you having to ask.

We’ll contact you directly if this applies to your order.

Why We’re Telling You This

Because we think you deserve to know how this works before you get to the checkout.

We’d rather explain our system, acknowledge its limitations, and tell you what we do when it gets it wrong, than quietly pocket any overage and hope you don’t notice. That’s not how we operate.

If you ever have a question about a shipping fee on your order, get in touch and we’ll work through it with you.